One year later
"Are you sure you don't mind if we stay out that late? The movie lets out at 10:30, but we won't be able to be back here till 11:00 and I know that's late for you guys."
"Deshavi relax, everything will be okay. Stay out all night if you want." Ella said calmingly.
Deshavi glanced at Trent in a mixture of desire and worry at the suggestion, but motherhood won out.
"I don't think I left enough milk to do that." She said anxiously.
Ella wrapped an arm around both Trent and Deshavi and started pushing them toward the door gently, but insistently.
"Everything will be fine. We have a crib. You know where it is in our bedroom. You have a key to the house and the spare bedroom is always available to you so stay out and have fun and come back as late as you please." Ella said, as she closed the screen door on the anxious parents and waved goodbye to them.
When they were gone she turned back to me with a smile and came closer. "Now we get to have fun with our little man here." She said softly, as she let the little boy in my arms grab her finger. It hadn't taken long to become a grandfather all over again, only this time it felt different.
I had basically raised Deshavi as my child, but that wasn't going to be the case for this little tike. They'd had the gall to name the little guy after me, Caleb Jr. They hadn't had to do that, but who was complaining. I could hold this little boy for hours and I only hoped there was enough good time left for me to watch him grow up and take him fishing, teach him to hunt, teach him about what I'd learned in life that I thought important enough to pass on.
Right now I felt like I could live to be a hundred given such a purpose as that and maybe I'd do just that, God willingly of course. I glanced up at my beautiful wife's face and her eyes rose from the baby to meet mine.
"Now I feel like Caleb."
She gave me a quizzical look, "What do you mean? You are Caleb?"
"No, I mean the biblical Caleb that I'm named for." I looked back down at the baby in my arms.
"All my life it seems that I've just gone from one moment of sorrow to the next. There have been moments of peace, even enjoy intermixed throughout, but they always seemed lost in whatever tragedy came up next. When I was having it good all I could expect was to somehow be beaten down, but not now. I've seen God work on my behalf, in my later years, like perhaps I'd never seen before or at least I wasn't aware of in my younger years. I've always tried to be like my namesake of the Bible, but I've always seemed to come up short. Caleb always seemed so undaunted by everything that came at him. He always relied in his God and felt that nothing was impossible to him. When he entered the Promise Land he was eighty years old, but his skills as a warrior had not dimmed from the time that he had been forty. He was given a possession in the promise land, even though he wasn't strictly of Hebrew blood. He was descended from Esau, but later adopted into the tribe of Judah. He had a name, he had a place of his own, he had the respect of many, he had faith to move mountains, and he had a family. Specifically he had a daughter that a warrior by the name of Othniel attacked and captured an entire city just to win the right to marry her. Caleb was firmly established and blessed by God for his faithfulness to Him. In this moment I feel like what he must have felt like."